A Thinking Street Photography Site
Why street photography?
1. Because it is always work in progress.
2. Because we’re all looking for something.
3. Because we’re waiting.
4. Because it deals with the mundane, and reality can be mundane.
5. Because it’s another way of looking at ourselves.
6. Because it is artful waiting.
7. Because we’re born to say “Let there be art”.
8. Because it’s a way, like any other.
I do have a routine, and go to the same few places time and again.
These are all taken within a week or so on the same roll of film, with my Minolta AF-C loaded with Kodak ColorPlus 200.
My usual haunts are Shamshuipo and Wu Kai Sha beach.
That’s a cooking stove by a village house along Wu Kai Sha beach.
They say the best camera is the one you have with you.
I have cult rangefinders such as the Canonet QL 17 GIII, Yashica GX and the Leica M6.
But nowadays I’m in a point-and-shoot and snapshot-aesthetics phase.
So it’s either a Contax TVS, Olympus XA2, or Minolta AF-C.
These are to me signs of life, these ropes and bricks, arranged as if for display.
Sometimes, I strike up a conversation with people with my broken Cantonese.
This gentleman runs a BBQ site at Wu Kai Sha beach. He was trying to convince me to book a BBQ pit for my family for the coming weekend and as a bonus, he would throw in a few complimentary pieces of cuttlefish.
At Shamshuipo. That’s one of my favorite pit stop. Whenever I walk past, I’d try to take a shot.
It seems we oscillate between desire and labour all the time.
We discipline ourselves to make sure the plumbing works.
But there is also another pace of life which you can see on weekends.
You’ll see people cycling, fishing and taking leisurely walks.
There are fast-paced days and there are slow-paced days.
Today, we’ll go slow.
This entry is about cycling with my son, without photographs of us cycling.
You can see our bikes in the background though.
At moments like this, we slip into another time. You’ll see people enjoying being alone, in their own space-time bubbles.
This is the bike shop we go to when there’s something to the bikes I can’t fix. They’re really friendly and will actually tell me I don’t need that pair of fancy bike gloves when a generic one would do as well.
My cynical self would think about the way they are setting up their profit margins. But they sometimes do minor repairs and maintenance for free as well.
The boss will just tell you it’s free of charge and please buy your next bicycle from him.
She was shielding her eyes from the sun, so naturally I brought my camera to my eye.
That’s at the end of Wu Kai Sha beach. You’ll see quite a number of village houses.
An open door.
You could see the contrast between village life and high rise living here.
Hong Kong is a city of sharp juxtapositions.
Thanks for reading!
I’m planning to use the following quote for a talk on poetry and photography for fellow writers.
It’s from Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist who has written on what he calls “liquid modernity”. This passage from his book The Art of Life is relevant to those who are on the quest for meaning:
To practise the art of life, to make one’s life a “work of art”, amounts … to being in a state of permanent transformation, to perpetually self-redefine through becoming … someone other than one has been thus far. (The Art of Life 73)
I now have the habit of bringing along one or two film cameras wherever I go. It’s usually a Leica M6, paired with either a Yashica GX, Canonet QL 17 Giii or more recently, the Olympus XA2.
The Olympus XA2 is really stealthy because of zone-focusing. And it’s really quiet too. For example, I could do this in a cab without the driver noticing:
Try that with a Canon 5D Mark III.
Part of my fascination with film cameras has to do with their longevity – digital cameras either go out of fashion or break down after 3-5 years (though it has to be said that my Canon G11 is still going strong). The Olympus XA2 was made in the 1980s, which means the thing in my hand is about 30 years old.
I guess I am now using my cameras as a sketchbook of sorts, storing material for writing and thinking. This is probably a little too deliberate, but I think of this as pushing myself beyond what I am, “becoming someone other than one has been thus far”, asking street photography to teach me to be a better writer and thinker.
For now, the art of life for me is about storing moments which might otherwise seem artless.
Lately, I have begun to take pictures with only my eyes, imagining what a scene would look like on a photograph… click… click…
And I like this quote from William Todd Schultz, who wrote An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, a wonderful psychobiography of Arbus:
Artists aren’t always in complete command of their material. Sometimes it commands them and they let it; they get out of the way, the subject matter comes unbidden, it compels them and they follow its lead.
This might be a careless comparison, but Arbus is to photography what Sylvia Plath is to poetry.
And as for material for the street photographer, there’s often poetry to be found in places you least expect, which is why that tiny Olympus XA2 is so handy:
The above is just next to where I live, a plot of land on which a small shopping mall is being built. *sigh*
I’m always fascinated by how one could be in a built-up area in Hong Kong, and after walking for 20 minutes, be in the midst of idyllic village houses where clothes are hung in open air and kitchens are next to public walkways:
And then, 10 minutes later, one is at the beach.
And you would come across scenes like this:
This is Wu Kai Sha beach, and there’re now plans for land reclamation in the area which would mean the beach would be no more… *another sigh*
Thanks for reading.
Hong Kong Lucida 